Notes from MPUG, October 2012

Twenty people came to the MPUG meeting at Inspire 9 this month for an evening of Python and pizza.

PyCon AU 2013

The dates for PyCon AU 2013 have been set: July 6 – 7, 2013, which will coincide with uni holidays. There is a plan for miniconfs, such as Django and OpenStack, on the 5th, hopefully with another CodeWars, and then sprints on the 8th and 9th.

The parse module

Richard Jones briefly covered the syntax for new style string formatting before launching into parse(), which is essentially the inverse of format(): parsing strings with format() syntax. There are 20+ types/conversions available and a plugin system to add your own types.
There are additional (obviously named) functions: search(), findall() and compile(), and while this may seem very reminiscent of re, the regular expression module, it offers a lot of the power without the often accompanying complexity.

Message queuing

Richard also presented his PyCon AU 2012 talk on message queueing by an MQ noob, covering some of the popular MQ solutions, with a focus on RabbitMQ and Pika. The summary was that RabbitMQ (and AMQP) is enormously powerful but also challenging to configure and debug, especially if you do not know Erlang (which RabbitMQ is written in).

TCPCatcher was mentioned as a useful tool for testing networks. It is cross-platform and allows you to monitor, record and modify TCP packets.